MODELS & STRATEGIES
Too often church planters start talking about the model of church they want to plant before some important issues have been addressed. The model they are considering is often based on something they saw, experienced, or read about that worked quite well in a different place, at a different time, or with a different focus group. A mistake the SBTC church planting team sees quite often is a planter trying to bring a particular model of church plant to a community or people group without first having done the hard work of researching, exegeting, and truly understanding that group or community.
Therefore, before a planter starts describing what he wants to do in a church plant, it would behoove him to answer these critical questions:
1. Who is God calling you to reach?
Where is he calling you to plant? Are you looking for a place – any place – to plant the ideal church? Or, are you responding to God’s call to plant the church he has in mind to reach a particular people in a particular place at a particular time? Have you researched and sought to understand as much as possible both the location and the people you are called to? Can you say, without hesitation, “These are the people and this is the place and I understand who they are and how they think?
2. How has God uniquely wired and prepared you?
Do you understand yourself well enough to know what God is calling you to be and do? Certainly, God can work miracles through the least of us, but he usually chooses to work through the nitty-gritty of our flawed personalities, experiences, skills, and abilities. Do yours match what you are setting out to do? A good church planter assessment is essential to help you discover this, especially if you are planting in a cross-cultural setting.
3. Remember that the Great Commission is about making disciples.
Nowhere does Jesus command us to go into the world and plant churches. The end purpose of our calling is to make obedient disciples who worship and glorify God; the best means to accomplish the Great Commission is to plant churches. Do what the Apostle Paul did – he found people, won them to the Lord, and then planted churches.
If this is the case, how are you going to find and connect with lost people? How are you going to make disciples who will then be gathered into a local body? Is what you are planning to do fit with who God has called you to reach? Are you willing to jettison any and every method, program, style, model, or idea that may prove to be an obstacle to reach people? Are you willing to think about how you are going to be a disciple-making, mobilizing, giving and sending missional church before you think about models?
Now, once those issues have been settled – then you are ready to talk about the church (or churches) you want to plant, be it traditional, contemporary, emerging, multi-housing, house church, purpose driven, Cowboy, or whatever. Just make sure the context and the people are driving your style and your model (I didn’t say message, I said model!). Make sure your missional purpose of penetrating lostness with the Light of Jesus Christ supersedes any consideration of style and model.
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